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Current internet encryption methods may not last 5 years.

blankslate

blankslate

Diamond Member
http://www.technologyreview.com/new...-the-prospect-of-an-internet-security-crisis/


“Our conclusion is there is a small but definite chance that RSA and classic Diffie-Hellman will not be usable for encryption purposes in four to five years,” said Stamos, referring to the two most commonly used encryption methods.

Any hints that those methods could be undermined must be taken seriously, said Stamos. They are used to protect banking, online commerce, and e-mail, as well as the mechanisms that ensure that updates downloaded by operating systems such as Windows and OSX are genuine. The result of the two encryption methods being broken would be, said Stamos, “a total failure of trust on the Internet.”
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Hopefully it doesn't happen but this seems like a big deal if even if the chance is "small"
 
Interesting but very steep claims to be met here, they're talking about mathematically solving some of the hardest issues with factoring prime numbers, we don't even have decent algorithms for reliably finding all the primes much less factoring them.

I'd be extremely interested to see the blackhat video of this conference and also see if this cropped up at defcon, unfortunately the videos seem to lag getting on to the net so we'll have to wait a while to see them.
 
If a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits could operate without succumbing to noise and other quantum interference phenomena, Shor's algorithm could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely used RSA scheme.

RSA is based on the assumption that factoring large numbers is computationally infeasible. So far as is known, this assumption is valid for classical (non-quantum) computers; no classical algorithm is known that can factor in polynomial time.

However, Shor's algorithm shows that factoring is efficient on an ideal quantum computer, so it may be feasible to defeat RSA by constructing a large quantum computer.

It was also a powerful motivator for the design and construction of quantum computers and for the study of new quantum computer algorithms. It has also facilitated research on new cryptosystems that are secure from quantum computers, collectively called post-quantum cryptography.
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Shor's Algorithm

In theory, if you could build and run a quantum computer of sufficient size, you could defeat RSA.

Though, I'm not planning to stop using RSA anytime soon...

Uno
 
Yep, D-Wave 2 is a 512 qubit quantum computer.

Not sure how long current public key cryptography has left regardless of the maths invloved 🙂
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Interesting but very steep claims to be met here, they're talking about mathematically solving some of the hardest issues with factoring prime numbers, we don't even have decent algorithms for reliably finding all the primes much less factoring them.
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Well, the article does say it's a small chance even if some experts now consider it a definite risk to widely used encryption methods.

Since it is a small chance maybe it won't happen even if it is a "definite possibility"
 
Pray To Jesus said:
Non issue really. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Pretty easy to update to new cryptography standards.
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According to the article the newer cryptographic standard that many think would be a suitable replacement is also a proprietary standard owned by Blackberry.

So the the question is can people persuade Blackberry to be altruistic or are there other suitable non-proprietary replacements?
 
blankslate said:
According to the article the newer cryptographic standard that many think would be a suitable replacement is also a proprietary standard owned by Blackberry.

So the the question is can people persuade Blackberry to be altruistic or are there other suitable non-proprietary replacements?
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I wouldnt expect blackberry to give up literally the only thing their company has keeping them from complete collapse out of the kindness of their heart.

I'm more expecting the big time security players to come up with new, more secure algorithms and encryption methods like they have been all these years. It's not like they've been sitting on their hands all these years since the last methods were created, i'm sure they've already been working on new things.
 
blankslate said:
According to the article the newer cryptographic standard that many think would be a suitable replacement is also a proprietary standard owned by Blackberry.

So the the question is can people persuade Blackberry to be altruistic or are there other suitable non-proprietary replacements?
Click to expand...

The Blackberry implementation is patented but I'm pretty sure something free would crop up if RSA looks more shaky in the future.

I think some European intelligence agencies have hopped over to ECC quite a long time ago and I don't agree that the NSA is behind the leading edge of crypto since the NSA has the resources to employ many mathematicians and nice incentives for breakthroughs while having access to all the openly published work.
 
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